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Education is compulsory in most nations of the world – the ages between five and fifteen are often set as the age range in which every child must attend school or have a formal private education. This translates into the fact that the better part of childhood and adolescence is spent on education – children and teenagers are busy attending schools, cram schools, tuition classes and all other sorts of education forms.

The making of education compulsory for the early years of an individual’s life has had remarkable effects: the literacy rates, as well as the overall intelligence of mankind has considerably increased from the mediocre rates history has seen. The UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has declared that due to compulsory education, the number of learned individuals in the three decades between 2006 and 2036 will surpass the number of learned individuals the world has seen in all of history until now. This statement is blatant proof of the positive effects compulsory education has brought upon humankind.Nonetheless, the question still exists – should compulsory education actually be compulsory?

Primary schools Sunshine Coast and secondary schools are usually compulsory in every country – tertiary education is most often left a choice of the student and his parents. The usual schooling method in every school is classroom education – where a single teacher (or two at most) teach a number of students averaging between twenty or thirty.

In developing countries, the situation is much more worse than that, with numbers averaging between forty and fifty for every classroom. The division of schools as public and private schools in recent decades has somewhat alleviated the problem globally, but the issue still remains.

The downsides to this type of education have been pointed out over the years by many different scholars. To quote the most obvious disadvantage it has, it is first imperative to know that the human personality, by nature, is unequal. Every human being differs from the other – and as such, every child has a different set of skills, latent potentials, likes, dislikes, etc. from the other.In such a situation, forcing such different children to receive education from a single individual at a set pace is akin to an infringement on their rights – the denser children will suffer to catch up, whilst the brighter children will suffer in being unable to learn more difficult material at a faster pace.

Since this is only one of the many disadvantages, the fact that compulsory education has to be heavily modified on a global scale is a clear factor. The question that many scholars raise – whether education should be compulsory at all – also becomes a sound argument when one proceeds to think on a deeper level as has been done above.